Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Retangling the Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy 2

Conspiracy
theory advocates are often criticized by those who more or less believe
in the official version of events as making far too much out of mere
coincidence. On the other end of the spectrum, conspiracy theorists
claim that these nihilists, holding the view that history is essentially a purposeless, random process, are "coincidence theorists."

Hail Satam

A
coincidence theorist, from this perspective, actively dismisses all of
the most anomalous, contradictory details in the mainstream media
account of things as being nothing but a set of coincidences. To be
dismissive in this manner, conspiracy theorists argue, is to either be
willfully ignorant or complicit in the conspiracy on some level.

The
fact that the towers on 9/11 fell in a way that exactly resembles
buildings that are brought down by controlled demolition is an example
of this type of "coincidence." The fact that one of the passports of the
accused hijackers miraculously survived this devastation intact and
undamaged enough for the authorities to determine that it was owned by a
member of Al Qaeda is another example.

A third such coincidence is the anomalous spike in market shorts,
during the days before 9/11, against those companies -- airlines,
insurance companies, etc. -- that were most negatively impacted by the
attacks. Similar 9/11 "coincidences" are legion.

In
almost all major events coincidences of this kind can be found in
abundance. A good conspiracy theory can account for all of these while
"coincidence theorists" will argue, often to absurd lengths, that they
are nothing but instances of pure chance.

At times,
though, even the believers of One Big Conspiracy, the absolutists, will
become bothered by coincidences that are so strange that to accept them
as being facets of the conspiracy would imply that the conspiracy was
far vaster, far more powerful, more supernatural, than even their grand
theories would allow for.

This creates a dilemma.
Either the absolutists, like the nihilists, must also dismiss these
things as being sheer coincidence, thereby implying that many of the
central planks in their own theory might be jettisoned accordingly, or
they must inflate their theory to even more all-encompassing dimensions.

This
inflationary move is the course most often taken. The theories grow in
complexity and absurdity, but this is the only means to safeguard the
absolutist position.

There are a large number of coincidences of this order. By now almost everyone has heard of those connecting the lives and assassinations of presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. Here is a sample:

Both presidents were shot in the head.Both presidents were shot on a Friday in the presence of their wives.Both presidents were accompanied by another couple.The male companion of the other couple was wounded by the assassin.Both presidents had a son die during their presidency.Lincoln
was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre; Kennedy was shot by
Lee Harvey Oswald in a Lincoln automobile, made by Ford.Both presidents' last names have 7 letters.

A
staggering amount of paradigm-bending coincidences of this second order
can also be found in relation to 9/11. For several years now
researchers have claimed that the uncanny frequency of the number eleven in the events of that day, the immense volume of "predictive programming"
allegedly foreshadowing 9/11 in the popular media, the esoteric
symbology of the twin towers (Jachin and Boaz), the Pentagon, Flight 93, etc, all identify 9/11 and other mass events as nothing less than occult "mega-rituals."

All
of this would appear to take us well beyond the customary bailiwick of
the intelligence agencies. At this point in their journey the believers
in One Big Conspiracy face a very abrupt fork in the path. They must
either abandon their absolutist perspective and embrace a rather
nebulous notion of cosmic synchronicity or they must consider that the
conspiracy ultimately transcends what is humanly possible.

So,
The Biggest Secret for me, in summary, is that an extraterrestrial race
has interbred with humanity, creating particular hybrid bloodlines
which they can work through from this dimension very close to ours, and
that as it expanded over the thousands and hundreds of years to the
present day, they've managed to expand their power out of a power base
in the Near and Middle East, other places too but particularly there,
until today they are actually in control of the planet.And
it is the ultimate control because they're controlling the planet from
another dimension, but most of humanity doesn't even think that there
are other dimensions. And this suppression of knowledge about other
dimensions, the suppression of knowledge of the nature of life, the
nature of frequencies and vibrations, ... the eternal nature of
consciousness, ... the very knowledge or even perception that there
could be any other dimension or any other levels of life ... means that
they can go on controlling humanity from levels of existence that most
of humanity doesn't even accept exist. I mean, you can't get better
forms of control than that.

The Ruthless Love Of The Dreaming Mind

Icke's
idea that beyond the intelligence agencies, beyond the financial
institutions that fund these agencies and their governments, beyond the
ruling family dynasties that have always dominated these institutions,
and beyond even the esoteric societies that practice the secret religion
of these dynasties, are non-human, off-world, extra-dimensional
entities -- the true archons of this world -- is not really all that
novel.

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in their bookThe Sion Revelation, explain that just such a belief became widespread among European occultists of the mid-18th century:

The
arrival of the Unknown Superiors marked the introduction of an
important new element into European esotericism, which was to develop
into the idea of orders being under the guidance of spiritual or
nonterrestrial entities rather than anonymous human beings -- this
notion eventually became more or less indispensable to magical orders.

This doctrine of the "Secret Chiefs"
became increasingly prominent within late 19th century esoteric
organizations like the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn. Precursors of this idea, though, can be traced back to
the early and medieval Catholic belief in the Communion of the Saints,
a mystical body of all Christians, both living and dead, with Christ at
its head. From a pessimistic perspective, though, which is far closer
to that of Icke, these entities greatly resemble the original Archons of
Gnosticism.

Only
entities of this capacity, being unbounded by the third dimensional
barriers of space and time, would have the ability to carry out
conspiracies apparently forged from the raw material of synchronicity
itself. One of the first absolutist, occult conspiracy theorists of this
type was James Shelby Downard.

Downard
called the sinister architects of the conspiracy "masonic sorcerers,"
and it is clear from his writing that even if these beings were human in
name their abilities and ambitions were in no way limited to the human
sphere. Downard lays this out in the context of the JFK assassination:

But
the ultimate purpose of that assassination was not political or
economic but sorcerous: for the control of the dreaming mind and the
marshalling of its forces is the omnipotent force in this entire
scenario of lies, cruelty and degradation. Something died in the
American people on November 22, 1963 -- call it idealism, innocence or
the quest for moral excellence. It is the transformation of human beings
which is the authentic reason and motive for the Kennedy murder and
until so-called conspiracy theorists can accept this very real element
they will be reduced to so many eccentrics amusing a tiny remnant of
dilettantes and hobbyists.

"Control
of the dreaming mind" implies a near complete mastery of the realm of
synchronicity and the archetypes, and this is precisely the radical thesis
that Downard is presenting. We are all the dreamers of this world, but
increasingly this dreaming power, which most of us do not know that we
possess, is being stripped from us. We dreamers become disposable bit
players in the grand consensus nightmare of the masonic sorcerers.

Even Robert Anton Wilson appeared temporarily fazed by the extremes of Downard's vision. In Cosmic Trigger he
writes about a tape that Downard and his partner, William Grimstad,
produced summing up their theories, entitled "Sirius Rising":

Later, Mr. Grimstad sent me a tape, entitled "Sirius
Rising," in which he and another conspiracy buff named Downard set forth
the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati
theory of them all. The only trouble is that, after all the weird data
we have already surveyed, the Grimstad-Downard theory may not sound
totally unbelievable to us.

The
idea, though, that advanced entities use coincidence or synchronicity
in order to communicate with and control humanity is not limited to
sublime paranoids like Downard. The scientist John C. Lilly also held
that an institution called the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.), which ultimately takes its orders from a Cosmic Control Center (C.C.C.)
via Galactic and Solar System sub-centres, is a non- or trans-human
collective that is fully enabled to generate and control the
coincidences of individuals on Earth. Lilly conveyed the following message from ECCO:

To all humans
If you wish to control coincidences in your own life on the planet
Earth, we will cooperate and determine those coincidences for you
under the following conditions:

1) You must know/assume/simulate our existence in ECCO
2) You must be willing to accept our responsibility for control of
your coincidences.
3) You must exert your best capabilities for your survival programs
and your own development as an advancing/advanced member of ECCO's
earthside corps of controlled coincidence workers. You are expected
to use your best intelligence in this service
4) You are expected to expect the unexpected every minute, every hour
of every day and of every night.
5) You must be able to maintain conscious/thinking/ reasoning no matter
what events we arrange to happen to you. Some of these events will
seem cataclysmic/catastrophic/overwhelming: remember stay aware,
no matter what happens/apparently happens to you.

6) You are in our training program for life: there is no escape from
it. We (not you ) control the long-term coincidences; you (not we)
control the shorter-term coincidences by your own efforts.
7) Your major mission on earth is to discover/create that which we
do to control the long-term coincidence patterns: you are being trained
on Earth to do this job.
8) When your mission on planet Earth is completed, you will no longer
be required to remain/return there.
9) Remember the motto passed to us (from GCC via SSCU):
"Cosmic Love is absolutely Ruthless
and Highly Indifferent:
it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not."

Ignoring
the abrasive cosmogonic bureaucratese of the whole dispatch, the final
motto is particularly ominous. Not only conspiracy absolutists like
Downard and Icke should be alarmed by it. The motto amounts to saying --
we will make you experience synchronicity, positive and/or negative, in
order to usher you into "Cosmic Love" regardless of your feelings in
the matter. At the same time, though, it is obvious that Lilly concluded
that this was absolutely necessary for the good of humanity. Sometimes
love is tough.

Instruction and Frustration

From here on the spaghetti theory of
conspiracy reenters the story. Just as at lower levels of the
conspiracy, within the relatively mundane cloak-and-dagger charades of
the intelligence agencies, there is no single unified plot of dominance
but rather a multiplicity of cliques jostling for total control, it is
the same thing in the more rarefied spheres of the transhuman entities.

Robert Anton Wilson in Cosmic Trigger,
recording a discussion with personal student of Crowley and O.T.O.
head, Grady McMurtry, brings up the question of why movements that
beneficially expand consciousness are always so rapidly squelched by the
authorities rather than allowed to flourish.

"I'll
tell you what I think," Grady said. "There's war in Heaven. The Higher
Intelligences, whoever they are, aren't all playing on the same team.
Some of them are trying to encourage our evolution to higher levels, and
some of them want to keep us stuck just where we are." According to Grady, some occult lodges are working with those
nonhuman intelligences who want to accelerate human evolution, but some
of the others are working with the intelligences who wish to keep us
near an animal level of awareness.This is a standard idea in occult circles and it can safely be
stated, without exaggeration, that every "school" or "lodge" of adepts
that exists is regarded, by some of the others, as belonging to the
Black Brotherhood of the evil path.

In
a sense, this is a very traditional idea. Since the time of Adam, angels
and demons have been in perpetual warfare over the possession of the
souls of humanity. There have always been at least two great and
conflicting conspiracies. One wants us to soar to the realm of the
Spirit and one wants us to become ever more enmired in base and debasing
Matter.

The late medieval grimoire, The Book Of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, also takes up this theme:

The infamous Belial hath no other desire than that of obtaining the
power of hiding and obscuring the True Divine Wisdom, so that he may
have more means of blinding simple men and of leading them by the nose;
so that they may always remain in their simplicity, and in their error,
and that they may not discover the Way which leadeth unto the True
Wisdom; seeing that otherwise it is certain that both he and his Kingdom
would remain bound and that he would lose the title which he giveth
himself of "Prince of this World," having become the slave of man. This
is wherefore he seeketh to annul and destroy utterly this Sacred Wisdom.

Given
the influence of this text on Crowley and the Golden Dawn in general it
is easy to see how this teaching would enter into notions of the Black
Brotherhood. To me this also brings to mind the work
of Philip K. Dick and his opposition of Belial with VALIS/Zebra. Dick
was certainly not one to believe in a single all-controlling cosmic
conspiracy.The Dickian reality is multifaceted, fluid, schizophrenic,
spaghetti-like.

In W.B. Yeats's magnus opus, A Vision (a
book which I intend to explore deeply in future posts), Yeats reveals
that the "system" of the book was presented to him and his young wife
during automatic writing sessions and "sleeps" by mysterious
disincarnate entities which Yeats simply calls the "Instructors."
Fascinatingly, Yeats also mentions opposed entities called the
"Frustrators."

Because
they [the Instructors] must, as they explained, soon finish, others whom [they called] the
Frustrators attempted to confuse us or waste time. Who these
Frustrators were or why they acted so was never adequately explained ...
but they were always ingenious and sometimes cruel. The
automatic script would deteriorate, grow sentimental or confused, and
when I pointed this out the communicator would say ‘From such and such
an hour, on such and such a day, all is frustration’ . . . but had I not
divined frustration he would have said nothing . . . and a Frustrator
doubtless played upon my weakness when he described a geometrical model
of the soul’s state after death which could be turned upon a lathe . . .
One said, as though it rested with me to decide what part I should play
in their dream, ‘Remember, we will deceive you if we can.’

As mentioned before
in this blog, in his field studies among the peasants of western
Ireland Yeats discovered that Irish fairies could be similarly divided
into groups that either tended to help or hinder humankind. The
Instructors and Frustrators appear to be higher order representatives of
the same phenomenon. Clearly, as on all other levels of nature, there
is also abundant diversity on the planes beyond the all-too-human.

Disguises Of Enchantment

In
postmodern ET lore the number of different reported alien races,
cryptoids and preternatural beings of all sorts is immense and growing.
The Watcher Files website has compiled an extensive, heavily annotated list
of such entities ranging from the Agharians and Alpha-Draconians to
Zombies. In the face of all this "evidence" it is hard to imagine that
anyone would hold the view that there is just one cosmic conspiracy. The spaghetti stretches up to the stars and deep into the bowels of the hollow earth.

Nor
should we assume that this is something new. Graham Hancock, carrying
on the research of people like Jacques Vallée and John Keel, argues in
his book Supernatural that the whole UFO/alien abduction
phenomenon is structurally very similar to accounts of fairy encounters,
to shamanic ordeals in which the shaman has his body dismembered by
spirit entities -- his bones removed and replaced by quartz crystals,
and to the DMT experience. And Hancock finds the record of virtually
identical experiences in cave paintings dating back to the Paleolithic.
He concludes:

The bottom line would be that non-human, apparently non-physical
intelligences, whose first interactions with us are documented in rock
paintings of therianthropes dating back 35,000 years, and who inspired
all the world’s religious traditions, are still present amongst us
today, following their own agenda according to their own timetable and
purposes.

And
what is the nature of these intelligences? Hancock explains that even
the top academic investigators of the DMT experience, Richard Strassman
and Benny Shannon, have no real clue who or what their case studies are
contacting.

The upshot is that Strassman and Shanon, the top scientists in this
field, are able to offer theories, but not definitive explanations, for
the mysterious universal hallucinations of spirit beings that our
ancestors first depicted in rock art 35,000 years ago, that took the
form of gods and goddesses for the high civilizations of antiquity, that
were known as fairies, elves, demons, and goblins in the European
Middle Ages, and that continue to manifest in the twenty-first century
as spaceships and aliens while still retaining much of their ancient “enchantment”
and many of their traditional disguises. Nothing that Strassman and
Shanon have discovered rules out the possibility that these complex
hallucinations, and the distinctive themes such as therianthropy,
hybridism, abduction, and the wounded man that run through them from the
earliest times until today, might represent veridical encounters with
alternative realities.

For me, it is without question that these are "veridical encounters with
alternative realities." To Hancock's list, though, I would also add
the beings reportedly encountered during Near Death Experiences, angelic
and Marian apparitions, beings evoked in ceremonial magick, ghosts and
the shadowy realm of the ancestors and the dead. Terence McKenna stated
at least once that is was very probable that the famous "machine elves" of his own trips to hyperspace were, in fact, the dead.

My
own private opinion about this is, I think that what psychedelics in
these high-dose, correct set/setting situations carry us into is an
ecology of souls. . . . Those ‘things’ in that place are our ancestors.

This would seem to agree with Yeats. The poet explained throughout A Vision that
the entities he communicated with were quite human although not
presently existing in physical bodies. Yeats went on to state that all
angels and demons are likewise human in one form or another. Fairies in
Irish folklore also were once a race of men, the Tuatha Dé Danann,
that retreated into an underworld or parallel dimension of the
landscape. In fact, this is the most ancient view of such entities. Are
the myriad of races of aliens, therefore, also different character types
of humanity? Could they be in actuality our shape-shifting ancestors?

The Root Of All Demons

From
Tibetan Buddhism, however, is found another piece of this puzzle. In a
ritual practice stemming from pre-Buddhist shamanism, and very closely
related to the shamanic ordeals covered by Hancock and as recorded by
Mircea Eliade in Shamanism, called chodor gcod
we find a very different explanation of the encounter with spirit
entities. Described as a "tantric feast," the chod practitioner ventures
off alone at night to a haunted charnel ground where wild animals
devour corpses left exposed to the elements -- or to some equally
horrifying location.

Here,
the practitioner bangs a drum made from human skull caps and blows a
trumpet fashioned from a human thigh bone while dancing madly. He is
summoning all of the spirits of that place, all of the gods and demons
of the world in general to rip apart and consume his body and mind. As
Giacomella Orofino writes in "The Gcod Tradition" fromTantra In Practice:

This dance is followed by the evocation of all kinds of gods and
spirits, invited to attend the ritual sacrifice of one's body. The gcod
pa [practitioner] visualizes the transformation of his consciousness into a dakini, who
cuts the head off his physical body and then places the corpse inside
the cranium, which stretches to cosmic proportions. The corpse is
subsequently transformed in accordance with the wishes of the guests,
multiplied infinitely, and offered to them as a gift.

What follows is a series of coloured offerings: white, multi-coloured, red and black. These recall the stages
in the alchemical process, including the multi-coloured stage called
the Peacock's Tail. Clearly, the chod practitioner has become the lead
or shit which will be tortured and "killed" in order to become gold.

Then the offering is divided into various categories: the white
offering, in which the yogin visualizes that his body is transformed
into ambrosia to be consumed by the higher deities and the three jewels:
the buddhas, devas, and dakinis; the multicoloured offering, in which
his body is transformed into all kinds of riches and material goods and
offered to the dharmapalas, the protector spirits of Buddhist law; the
red offering, in which the dismembered flesh and blood are multiplied
infinitely to appease the demons and fierce spirits; and finally the
black offering, in which the officiant visualizes that all the errors
and wrongdoings in the world are absorbed into his body, which is then
offered as a meal to the demons.These offerings aim to satisfy all spirits, both higher and lower, in
order to placate negative impulses and to eliminate definitively the
ills of the world.

Structurally, this is recognizably the shamanic dismemberment ordeal and initiation, the alien abduction experience, a bad trip on DMT or datura, an evocation of the demon Choronzon
without the protection of a magickal circle, etc. but shockingly it is
very welcomed in this tradition. It is, in fact, the goal of the entire
chod practice to suffer in this most excruciating and madness-inflicting
manner. The final aim of the gcod pa is to attain the
realization that all of the demons and gods attacking her very being,
both physically and spiritually, are in truth only aspects of her own
mind.

The root of all demons is one's own mind.If one feels attraction and desirein the perception of any phenomenon, one is captured by the demons.When the mind grasps at phenomenaas if they were external objectsone becomes contaminated

This is from the 11th century poem, "Great Collection of the Teachings,"byMa
gcig Lab sgron, the woman teacher who developed the practice of chod. And
with this practice the whole of the absolutist cosmic conspiracy is
literally turned on its head.

The chod demons are the
exact equivalents of the entities of shamanism, the "machine elves" of
the DMT experience, the space alien abductors, and the "secret Chiefs"
of the occult orders. With this extreme Tibetan ritual practice we
finally discover who it is that looks out from the Eye in the Pyramid:
as yet unintegrated aspects of our own mind.

Objects of Animation

At once
this recalls Jung. It is very tempting at this point to reduce
everything down to the workings of the unconscious mind. From this
viewpoint the "entities" are not real at all. They are temporary
autonomous portions of the psyche that can be, through analysis,
consciously integrated into a more healthy and enlightened sense of the
Self. The experience of synchronicity, prodigies, encounters with spirit
beings and so on are merely necessary stepping stones on the path to
full individuation.

In other words, this Jungian
interpretation is a great way to dismiss cosmic conspiracy and the
actual existence of the entities altogether. Unfortunately, the
spaghetti will not let us rest here. And however "Jungian" this might
sound it would seem that the Master himself is in no way this reductive.
As Jung wrote in Psychology and Alchemy:

Since we cannot possibly know the boundaries of something unknown
to us, it follows that we are not in a position to set any bounds to the
self. It would be wildly arbitrary and therefore unscientific to
restrict the self to the limits of the individual psyche, quite apart
from the fundamental fact that we have not the least knowledge of these
limits, seeing that they also lie in the unconscious. We may be able to
indicate the limits of consciousness, but the unconscious is simply the
unknown psyche and for that very reason illimitable because
indeterminable. Such being the case, we should not be in the least
surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear
all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined by space and time.

And
with this we are swept up in the swirling, tangled noodly strands once
again. These experiences cannot be reduced in the above way because the
psyche itself has no known limits. We can, as in Tibetan Buddhism, view
the entities as being aspects of our own minds but we cannot conclude
that they are unreal. They are at least as real as the psyche
itself, which Jung admitted as being illimitable and indeterminable.
Wow. The carpet is yanked from under our feet and the floor erased.

In
the tradition of Buddhism that Ma gcig followed, all is Mind. The
universe, really only existing as a concept, is far more like a vast,
complex dream than any sort of mechanism. Any laws that appear to be in place are really only provisional, temporary. Mind is primary.

The
same idea, more or less, can be found in a neglected corner of modern
Western philosophy. The much ridiculed George Berkeley arrived at a very
similar conclusion. We can read this at the close of Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous:

Whereas to say - There is no Matter, if by that term be meant
an unthinking substance existing without the mind; but if by Matter is
meant some sensible thing, whose existence consists in being perceived,
then there is Matter...

What
we call matter, in other words, exists only as and through the mind.
Truly, we are the stuff that dreams are made of. Berkeley called his
philosophy immaterialism and it is also called philosophical idealism.
Jung did not, to my knowledge, confess to holding such a view, but his
above idea that there is no definable limit to the mind takes us very
close to Berkeley.

William Blake, however, was a big fan of Berkeley (as was Joyce). If anything, Blake thought that Berkeley did not go far enough. For Blake, all is imagination. And in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake relates a fable that sums up nearly everything that this post is trying to express:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or
Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the
properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and
whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;Till
a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the
vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from
their objects: thus began Priesthood;Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

The Gods and Geniuses, the entities of all kinds, were once understood as residing in the human heart. Through
the expression of the imagination the archaic Poets animated the world
with these beings. Eventually, though, things became systematized.
Certain Poets became
Priests and began to monopolize knowledge of the new system. And in
this way they were able to mystify and then enslave the masses who
continue to forget the true power of their imagination.

Towards A Worldwide Chod

All of these characters, Icke and Downard and McMurtry and Lilly, are correct in many respects. The world is
dominated by warring factions of beings and their more human
representatives who control us through their knowledge of reality as
imagination. Conspiracy theory itself, becoming more and more
psychedelic in nature, is gradually taking us all to this realization.
Perhaps there will need to be the equivalent of a collective, worldwide chod to cause us to remember once more where all the deities truly reside.

As
conspiracy theory becomes increasingly psychedelic, though, there is an alternate theory, growing in popularity, that everything psychedelic, including
presumably this entire post, is total conspiracy. The crooked trail of iridescent meatballs takes a turn next in this direction.

19 comments:

I really liked the epistemoligcal, meta-conspiracy structure you created in part 1 but I think the Chod summary oversimplifies everything: isn't your final position that of a Jungian psychological coincidence theorist? By saying 'it's just a ride, man' we effectively become inverted nihilists. Lets say there is a conspiracy taking place somewhere in the world. A transnational corporation or govt is doing something highly illegal etc. What will the Alan Watts/Leary/Alt New-Age due to stop that conspiracy aside from postulating an elaborate cosmological self-help strategy for dealing with darker motives of the unconscious? Who within, however you want to qualify, the conspiracy will take those ideas into action?

To me, part two stems naturally from part one. To account for the synchronicities that inevitably emerge in mass events the absolutists extend the conspiracy to the beyond human. This meshes well with what the secret societies themselves say. The ultimate masters are the "Secret Chiefs," which more recently have been identified with the ETs, and compared with the spirit abductors in shamanic ordeals and fairy lore, etc.

The spaghetti theory still very much applies here. There are cooperating and competing "cosmic" conspiracies (plural), but there is no One Big Conspiracy which rules the universe.

The revelations gained from the chod practice takes this to a whole other level. The demons ARE within, but the within is identical with the without. This may be Jung's own position, as I suggested, but most Jungians do not go this far at all. Total groundlessness is difficult for anyone to accept, including myself.

I deeply sympathize with those who want to deal effectively with the "concrete" conspiracies of governments and corporations. I encourage and participate in active resistance on this level as well. I am more and more convinced though, especially in study of Blake, that the roots of even these conspiracies are magickal.

Blake's call to action was revolutionary, but by this he means revolution leading to revelation -- nothing less than the release of the Titans from the underworld. My phrase "worldwide chod" is metaphoric, but this is essentially what I'm referring to.

Here's a conspiracy for you, government changes policies in regards to shale oil, oil assets that have been protected around the globe lose value, causing financial crash in 2008. Cash flow is needed to reinvest in shale assets, bailout, drop in financial market causes businesses to fire employees destroying the middle class in the process, and lowering housing values because there is no longer a middle class who can afford houses.

Chod reminds me of the Ant and the Grasshopper, there is no story without either.

"the entities of all kinds, were once understood as residing in the human heart" This is subversive art now we have come full circle

Entirely makes sense. It is interesting and more than a bit terrifying that due to the excessive and growing energy requirements of the state/corporate machine that actual titanic demons of the underworld have broken out in places like the Gulf of Mexico and Fukushima. Who will we face next? Where will it emerge? "The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep." The Ant should chill and join the Grasshopper in play.

I have waited to read this post. Knowing that what is presented will be hard to chew. Having used ethnogens many times in my life, I have truly taken the path less traveled. The Jung in me is always looking for synchs to correct my life. Being present in the now is always tempered by dreamtime.. I have enjoyed every post on Groupname for grapejuice. Thank you Dennis

Very interesting post in deed. My favourite quotes are these: “Conspiracy theory advocates are often criticized by those who more or less believe in the official version of events as making far too much out of mere coincidence. On the other end of the spectrum, conspiracy theorists claim that these nihilists, holding the view that history is essentially a purposeless, random process, are "coincidence theorists."”

…“"Control of the dreaming mind": implies a near complete mastery of the realm of synchronicity and the archetypes, and this is precisely the radical thesis that Downard is presenting. We are all the dreamers of this world, but increasingly this dreaming power, which most of us do not know that we possess, is being stripped from us. We dreamers become disposable bit players in the grand consensus nightmare of the masonic sorcerers.”

This makes complete sense and let me summarize in my own way. What patriarchal traditional religions and philosophies and secular indoctrination, including scientism have contributed to is instilling in the group mind a sense that nature and reality are either fallen, and ruled over by evil, or meaningless mechanical and random. In both these worldviews which bleed into each other (Galileo, the father of modern science emerges in the oppressive tradition worldview which seeks to suppress his knowledge) there is made in us to feel a disconnect between us and nature, and also our very physical bodies, senses, thinking and feeling...MEANWHILE, behind the scenes are nefarious secret groups that are aware of magickal connections but use this knowledge in a harmful way, and a way to have and keep and expand power over the rest of us who, for many, have become hapless slaves, puppets, playthings. Utterly unaware, lacking ancient remembrance of a reality which in its essence is both practical but also magical and interrelated. I have found great taboo in trying to talk about the occult to do with 9/11 etc etc even with members (leaders and followers. Including people like Graham Hancock) of the psychedelic community. You would expect people there to have deep interest in such deep explorations, but NOT about this! This just shows to me the age old trauma to do with this understanding---the persecutions.

I would though go even deeper than where you seem to be at. For example, the perspective I am coming from is a Goddess religious perspective. This perspective takes into account patriarchal thinking as connecting all these seemingly disparate branches of belief--traditional religions and philosophies, secular thinking, scientism and the occult. A book i VERY much recommend you read is this one Return of the Dark/Light Mother or New Age Armageddon? Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future by Monica Sjoo . There is a dualistic tendency throughout patriarchal thinking to present two 'choices'---either the scientific worldview where all is supposed to be 'matter' or 'physical' OR New Age thinking where everything is supposed to be 'mind'. Usually with the latter we are supposed to be imprisoned in a 3D sensual prison, and people like David Ickle create a very paranoid view of nature, even claiming the moon is an artificial hide out for evil aliens who do not like us. Well I see such scenarios as scripts coming from the very Illuminati themselves. Their strategy is always DIVIDE & CONTROL and the deeper aspect of this control is dividing us from nature, the land, and also from our own being. This is huge reason for their war on psychedelics! Psychedelics or sacred medicine is really the most direct means to directly undo their controlling spells. No it cannot suddenly dissolve their evil war obsessed polluting matrix, but first we have to wake up to their mindcontrol as well as activism.

Thank you also for the book recommendation. It's interesting that I've got Monica Sjoo's The Great Cosmic Mother on a shelf literally right above my head as I write this.

I think I very much know where you're coming from. A decade or more ago I read a lot by Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, Merlin Stone, etc. I still have great sympathy for this line of thinking, as well as for advocates of a return to a "paleolithic" perspective, but I'm starting to realize that the myths and poetry behind these things are more important than the "history" involved. History is great for providing metaphors, but I don't require it to validate anything.

I really agree with your critique of the New Age. This is a very wide umbrella term, and of course there are many books identified as such that I enjoy reading, but it usually can be boiled down to one of two things I don't jive with.

Either it's a notion of nature-plus -- the idea that present day science just has not yet discovered the superhuman abilities that eastern or other exotic traditions have long practiced -- or it's some form of transcendentalism -- the idea that there is a perfect realm beyond our own.

I will explore both of these views, but neither is particularly to my liking. Nor, however, am I presently partial to the idea that nature herself is supreme. Nature requires a mediator and mediators, the middlemen, soon become priests.

Instead, the imagination is nature. It is what is primary and we all possess it unmediated. The fall of humanity, and its degradation of nature, arrives with the clouding of our perception. These veils are maintained by those (in actuality aspects of ourselves) who have gained in keeping us limited, but all of us have the power -- not material or physical power but imaginal power -- to tear down the veils.

I would be interested to hear how you perceive imagination to be different from thought, and (along these lines) how Blake's "imagination is everything" may be different from New Age assertion(s) of "thought/mind is everything".

I can sense that the "imagination" you refer to probably has something to do with the Sufi idea of "imaginal" - but I have to confess that none of the explanatory literature on the Sufi "imaginal" really stuck with me, so I would be interested to hear in your own words what you think the Sufi "imaginal" refers to.

If it serves as any background to my questions, here is a bit of linguistic curiosity: the word for "imagination" in modern Japanese (and in modern Chinese too, since the Chinese imported the word from Japan) - 想像力 - was only invented after it became necessary to translate the idea from the West, probably circa the turn of the 20th century. Before that, the people of China and Japan were content to use the same word for "think" 想 to mean, among other things, "imagine" (it's actually more complicated than that, I am simplifying a lot of things here).

Anyway, if you take the word 想 apart, it is "seeing 目 a tree 木 in the heart 心". Consider this:

"I am thinking of a tree."

"I am imagining a tree."

To the premodern Chinese/Japanese mind, the line between the above two are blurry. It's not that concept of "imagination" does not exist to them - one can tell from the context of the text if they using the word 想 to mean if they are thinking about something logically, recalling something from memory, or creating a fantasy. It's more like to them, all these activities of the mind form an organic, indivisible whole.

To draw an analogy, to many cultures before the modern era - the colours of green, blue and (sometimes) black were considered to be "the same colour". (See Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass). I suspect it is the same thing with "thought" and "imagination" too.

Great stuff as usual, PRM. Just emerging from the new year gloom so my apologies for being so lax.

Blake's distinction is not the imagination from thought, but the imagination from reason. "Mental Things are alone Real." Reason is necessary but Blake viewed it as having far too much sway in his own time (now too, I think).

Reason is a sort of a averaging principle. It looks for commonalities and generalities and on finding these it constructs patterns and rules. The imagination, in contrast, deals in the "minute particulars." It finds beauty and power in the unique and singular, and it is only through the unique and singular -- not the general rule -- that we can stop the wheel.

Reason, as a single vision, sees the prosaic Sun and compares it to a golden coin. The imagination, though, has double vision. It sees the golden disk yet it also witnesses the choir of heavenly angels that it contains. The imagination is the unlimited visionary capacity that we all possess. It is accessed by fully opening our senses.

I have no problem with advocates of the New Age who state that only thought is real. I don't meet many people who actually believe this, though. Usually, as I wrote above, New Agers seem to insist that science has just not gone far enough -- eventually it will be able to prove by applying physical laws that what we now dismiss as "superpowers" are fully possible.

Blake did not believe in physical laws and he did not require proof. To do so would be to place reason above the imagination. Blake would condemn a lot of current New Age thinking as "natural religion."

The Sufi idea of the "imaginal" I know best through the work of Henri Corbin. The mundus imaginalis is that intermediary world between that of the senses (having form and substance) and the intelligible realm (having no form and no substance). It is also the realm of vision and in this way it is synonymous to Blake's "imagination".

If we apply this to the medieval cosmology, the senses correspond to the four elemental sub-lunar realm, the Empyrean is the intelligible, and the spheres of the planets and stars occupy the imaginal. The Sufis, Corbin, Blake, Paracelsus (one of Blake's probable sources) can be traced back at least as far as Neo-Platonism. With all, mind is primary to matter.

"Seeing a tree in the heart." A beautiful definition of the imagination. The differences in cultures that you stress are important and fascinating.

When Westerners point to themselves as Me or I they usually touch their chest. Japanese usually do this by touching their noses. On the other hand, Westerners will touch their heads when referring to the mind, Japanese to the heart. The Japanese way seems to make more sense. The ego is in the head and the mind is in the heart. Blake would agree. Maybe that is why the words for "thought" and "imagination" were the same?